A Second Holocaust

By Manfred Gerstenfeld

A second Holocaust may or may not ensue. The debate about it has already become common in recent years. Since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was first elected as President of Iran in 2005 he has frequently called for the elimination of Israel. In practice, this can only be achieved by mass murder. Developments in the nuclear field in Iran have however, turned his rhetoric of the past years into a serious actual threat.

At the turn of the century, the second Holocaust issue came up only infrequently in public debate. In 2000, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told Muslim worshippers in Teheran while referring to Israel: “We have repeatedly said that the cancerous tumor of a state should be removed from the region.”1 Then-Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said in 2002: “If one day…the world of Islam comes to possess the weapons currently in Israel’s possession [i.e., nuclear weapons]—on that day this method of global arrogance would come to a dead end. This…is because the use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam.”2

Remarks made by Iranian leaders were not the only reasons for incidental debates on this issue. As anti-Semitism increased, in 2002 American columnist Ron Rosenbaum stated that the “second Holocaust” was a phrase coined by Philip Roth in his 1993 novel Operation Shylock. Rosenbaum claimed it was realistic—rather than novelistic—that sooner or later a nuclear weapon would be detonated by Arab fundamentalists in Tel Aviv.3

Writer Leon Wieseltier reacted to this and similar pessimistic articles by stating that the Jews had achieved both safety and strength. He concluded: “The Jewish genius for worry has served the Jews well, but Hitler is dead.”4 Rosenbaum countered by claiming Wieseltier was fleeing into denial, as there were many Hitler-like examples of demonization of Jews in the Arab world. He referred to Palestinian justification of the Holocaust, the denial of the Holocaust by an Egyptian government paper while supporting Hitler if he had “indeed” exterminated the Jews, and a Saudi government broadcast of a cleric calling for the annihilation of the Jews.5

Continue reading →